_techie_

We have moved our admin offices over to windows 7 in the last 6 months. Everything is working pretty well, and we are happy with the way it has gone. The rest of our workstations are still running xp for teachers and students. The admin offices are using some light locking down with gpo policies, and I have got folder redirection working for the following: Desktop: redirected using gpo to unc path with read only access for users, based on user group (advanced). Documents: redirected using gpo to users home directory. Pictures/music/video: redirected using gpo to h:\my music/pictures/videos Downloads: redirected using gpo to h:\downloads Favourites redirected using gpo to h:\my intranet App data left local (not redirected). Links: redirected using gpo to unc path with read only access again for users. According to eventvwr all these are being successfully redirected, however the entire logon time first time round for these users can take about 1.45 to 2mins to logon. They are using local profiles (no default network profile setup). Other logon times after this are very quick (obviously) as the profile is local and now cached on the client workstation. I am willing to forgive the initial slow logon first time round, as these users do not 'hot desk', so this is an infrequent task for these users, and the only time an first time logon occurs, if the machine needs a rebuild/local hard drive failure. Is there anyway to speed this up, or something I am doing wrong here? Should I be using unc paths /other config instead of h:\pictures for the music/videos/pictures/downloads? It also seems to take a long time at 'preparing desktop' phase of logon first time round (approx 1 minute), before getting to the desktop. Is this normal for local profile creation? Considering there is no data being transferred at logon, i am wondering why this is taking as long as it does.. We have offline files DISABLED, so I am wondering what the problem here could be. I am now tasking myself with doing the setup for the student and teacher workstations. Current logon times take about 30-45 seconds, on Xp even with loading reasonable 20mb profiles, a complex start menu/desktop shortcut structure setup, mapping network drives using a script, and mapping printers based on OU name. This also includes waiting for about 8-10 seconds for the acceptable usage agreement to come up, and the button to be enabled. Using the admin office gpo as a base, I exported the current gpo object out, and re-imported into a new one for the student workstations and users. I have setup a new OU structure for windows 7 inside our current xp structure, blocked policy inheritance on it to stop existing xp policies applying and causing issues. Just thinking about this, it will have blocked the default domain policy, could this be affecting things? This is a hotdesking environment and like xp, we want to use folder redirection with most items sent to the users home area, but this time with mandatory roaming profiles, as we have approx 1600 students, and 200 staff on this site. We also have a lot more apps and server based/cd-rom apps, with a very structured start menu setup. To populate this, i have extensively used gpp, which seems to be working successfully. So far I have got nearly everything working okay, and redirected desktops set to a local folder on each workstation, but one for students, and one for staff. This seems to be working okay, and I am happy with the way security is working to stop students and staff saving work/data on the desktop. I currently dont have any mandatory roaming profiles setup, but again, logon seems to take at best, 2mins. Compared to xp, this is horrendous, and I really hope to get this resolved. I am sure it must be something I have done, but again looking through eventvwr, everything seems to be working correctly, and folder redirection is working 'apparently'. It also takes about a minutes to get past the dreaded 'preparing desktop' at logon. We have very basic users setup during testing (no profiles, or logon scripts set in AD), so I dont think this could be causing the issue! We have a firm grasp of GPO, folder redirection and startup/login scripts, so am unsure what to do next. Thanks for any advice help you can give. Thanks Mark.

i am not entirely sure, but you can still connect to the exchange box when in school, without a proxy set at all. However, this is unfeasible, since the users will no longer have any internet access!! This issue is now resolved though, with thanks to DT. Thank you!

You have PM - Thanks

Tried the destination exceptions...no joy. The default gateway is currently set to the router address (10.57.4.1), not smoothwall (10.57.4.3) Is this the problem? Thanks, Mark

G3 from what I am reading here on the smoothwall admin...

Smoothwall Guardian - (SWG)

Hi, We have a smoothwall box which seems to be working correctly as it should with regard to our web-filtering. We have our in-house hosted Exchange 2007 server which has an external address of www.bitcoinmerchandise.com | buy stuff with bitcoin When running Outlook 2010 client when using our smoothwall proxy, whenever Outlook client runs it prompts for username and password, even if the remember credentials box is checked. This is on Windows 7 btw. If using our "techie" non-smoothwall proxy, this issue goes away, and it is commonplace on our admin computers which run the full outlook client (not OWA) whilst using smoothwall as a web-proxy. I have tried adding numerous proxy exceptions to the users, including the IP of the exchange box, the local hostname, and the external address, all with no luck.... We do have auto discovery off, which I think might be linked to the problem, but we cannot run this anyway, as we are behind our county council corporate WAN firewall. I am sure this is some configuration issue with smoothwall that can be resolved - can I put some sort of proxy exception into smoothwall for this or is it something else. I have tried in outlook settings to turn off "Encrypt data between client and Exchange Server" but this didn't seem to do anything either. Can anyone help? Thanks _techie_

You can, however I have found they are particularly difficult to fit quite often, and getting them into the hole often makes them too loose, and they then 'spin', which means you can never lock them up! Depending on whether the face is smooth enough, from experience, we now use very big decent wall plugs, with a lip (to stop them pushing into the wall) and coarse 'coach' screws with a hex head. They work really well, and I have done a few cabs now this way with much success. The hex head also makes it easy to use a ratchet spanner inside the cab as well. We use these rawlplugs, they really are excellent. Hope this helps Mark

Well after much frustration, I tried setting up a new moodle on my local machine using Xammp. I had the database dump, theme, and moodledata directory. Managed to copy the moodle data directory in and add the theme. All good so far. As soon as I import my database dump into MySQL, I seem to get all sorts of problems: 1) during the import, it chucks me out of phpMyAdmin, without any reason! 2) Once I finally get my tables imported, the database type/engine for moodle is InnoDB, but all my tables that I imported are MyISAM. I guess this could be the problem! How do I change this over? Will it solve anything? Thanks, _techie_

Hi, We seem to have developed an interesting issue with our Moodle 2.0.4 installation, after having our hosting package updated with the same hosting company. Prior to the move the site worked fine, but we had some issues with performance, and overloading. The site is running fully, and you can easily navigate between pages as a guest user. We initially were unable to login to the site, although there were no error messages at this point. However at the login screen, it mentioned that our "session had ended, please login again". With much communication between the host and ourselves, we are now able to login. The host did run the cron.php maintenance script, and run a myISAM to innoDB update script, as it requested these changes in the notifications, when logged in as admin. We are now in the current situation: We can now login as admin on the homepage/frontpage. However, when we try and turn editing on, it just logs us out of the site. When we try and login to another course/page on the site, we are back at the 'cannot login again stage', as it just refreshes back to being logged out, but without any obvious error messages. I can only assume that there is some sort of permissions problem with sessions, or some sort of password 'salt' issue, as this is still the same set of characters in our config.php when the site was updated. Any suggestions? Thanks, _techie_

Just for everyones reference...You can update the firmware if there is a bootloader error. You just need to run the SMARTFirmware Updater Appwhich is within the SMART Product Drivers Directory on the client workstation. Hope this saves anyone some money!

We have a 600 series SMART Interactive Board, with a bootloader error (Orange/Amber Flashing Status Light). After working with these for 10 years, this is the first one I have seen. I cant seem to get any connection to the board either, and have tried multiple cables, laptops, and even bypassing the wiring loom to no avail. Is there any manual way to flash it, or is it a replacement board? How long is the warranty on the board as if we can get it replaced under warranty, then that would be great. Thanks, _techie_

UAC was disabled/off, and run as administrator worked fine. I guess win7 kind of has extra protection added in forextra security

Hi, I am having a few issues whilst trying to install 32bit Management tools for Exchange 2007 on my works machine. I am running SP1 for Windows 7, and am in an OU with some policies applied to it for basic configuration. I cannot for the life of me get the exchange management tools to install, since it keeps saying I need Administrator privileges on the machine to install. I am a member of Domain Admins. I have done the following: Logged on as local administrator - install fails since it cannot "see active directory" Used Group Policy to add Domain Admins to the local administrators group. I can check this has applied, and is fine. Set "install with elevated privilages" on both the user(s) and machines concerned, but still no joy. I can only assume that there is some other problem or GPO blocking it, as I have built a new VM with Windows 7 on the domain but in an OU free of any GPO's, and it has worked fine. The user logging on here is also in the "GPO free OU". Any ideas? Thanks, Mark

Hi, We have a netgear readynas 2100 rack mount NAS, RAIDed up. 3 iSCSI targets all setup, and connected, and online within MS iSCSI initiator. We have also just installed DPM 2010, and can see the iSCSI targets within DPM 2010. However, when come to actually choose the NAS iSCSI targets as a backup device/drive, it says it cannot use the iSCSI targets since they are not dynamic disks....well I can understand this, since the NAS operates at block level, as an iSCSI target (as far as I am aware) but really what use is this? Can you actually achieve an iSCSI target as a dynamic disk???? Any help would be good. There doesnt seem to be any way real options on the readynas in setting up the iscsi targets...

Cheers for your responses guys...I really want some dedicated support, so will talk to LUNS... Cheers Mark

We currently have our school website running on Moodle 2, on an external host, but are getting serious downtime problems....hence why I am looking for a decent moodle 2 hosting company in the uk. Anyone get any recommendations? Webanywhere any good? Cheers Mark

Yes, it was the profile that was screwed somehow. I just copied an existing one, made some changes, and it worked in the end. Sorry to say I couldn't pin down what was causing it, but most likely some sort of dodgy reg key, as part of NTUser.dat file.

I have a feeling, a rogue loopback policy may have found its way in there somewhere, as during the process, we were discussing it. A fresh set of eyes will see fit today!

Will check tommorow morning, as I have left now...I guessed as much, but will check eventvwr tommorow. I suppose I could always run gpmc.msc on both servers, and look for any surprises.. Thanks for your help.

Hi, Today we upgraded our new 2008r2 member server to our new DC, and everything seems fairly peachy, with very few problems. Previously we had 2 dc's with replication occuring between them (2003 r2 btw). Now we have one remaining 2003 r2 dc, with our 2008 r2 dc replicating to it. The other 2003 r2 dc was demoted to a member server, Before leaving tonight, we just tested our workstations (xp sp3), and not all of the gpo restrictions seem to be being applied, and logon seemed a bit slower than normal. The rest of logon seemed okay, and the profile loaded okay, and mapped drives seemed to be working okay as well, just things like disabling of context menu(right click) was not working, as well as our customised start menu etc. Having a little browse through the SYSVOL folder on the new DC, and 2003 DC, and the number of policies (in folders) was different between the two DC's by two! Is it possible that replication has not yet completely occured, and the other policies will pop up tommorow? Is there anyway to check that replication has occured correctly, or is there something else we might be missing? Cheers Mark

in answer to steve21 well..I ran a BAT file with the following: @echo OFF IF EXIST "C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\!Y2KBUG.ttf" GOTO END wscript.exe "C:\font_installer.vbs" :End ECHO Font installed correctly However...this just went straight to End immediately! If I just run the wscript.exe part it installs the fonts fine, but just repeats the issue everytime the bat file runs :-(

I have posted the code in my previous post. ^^^ Cheers _techie_

RIGHTT!!!! I have spent about 2.5 hours this afternoon working on trying to install fonts automatically in Windows 7 from a script! So far, I have come up with a basic script that installs the script fine at startup, but it can't seem to check in anyway, whether the font already exists.... Can anyone give me some help with my script - its a vbscript, as below: [b][i]' Fonts.installer ' ---------------------------------------------------------- Option Explicit Dim objShell, objFolder Const FONTS = &H14& Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application") Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace(FONTS) objFolder.CopyHere "\\%server%\%sharename%\!Y2KBUG.ttf" Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application") Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace(FONTS) objFolder.CopyHere "\\%server%\%sharename%\$FIVEDOU.ttf" Wscript.Quit[/i][/b] I don't know if it is something special to do with the Windows/Fonts directory in Windows 7, but nothing I do, can seem to check the exisitance of a font already in the directory.... Can anyone help! Cheers _techie_

Weuse something called desktop administrator, made by a company called ICT Networks, based in Stoke. It does exactly this, so you can assign shortcuts based on both users witha shared profile, and, a computers OU/location in this instance. The same goes for printers, also based on OU/ location. We are currently trying our best to get windows7 into our organisation within the next twelve months, once we have our policies sorted out so they work reliably!